Fourteen international students are tramping across the Millennium Bridge on the first day of freshers' week. It's grey and threatening rain but their eyes are wide, drinking in London's sights. They could be any of the thousands of students flying in from around the world for the new term. But these students are special.

Ten are from Israel, four from the occupied territories. Some are Jewish, some Muslim, some Christian. They represent the melting pot of the Middle East and they are about to spend four years living, working and studying together at City University.

Usually they might be eyeing one another suspiciously, or living on either side of a security fence. Usually they might never meet. Instead, last week, they chatted confidently about their new halls, the things they had seen in the 24 hours since they arrived and what the term has in store. All things they firmly share in common.

These are the first Olive Tree scholars. Each has been picked to study a degree of their choice, with all fees paid and a means-tested bursary. They include a student peace activist, a star of the Israeli cinema and the founder of an orchestra made up of young Israelis and Palestinians.

The scheme is the brainchild of City's deputy vice-chancellor, Professor Steve Miller, and businessman Derek Tullett. They were mulling over the issue of scholarships in a cafe one day when they had the "joint thought" for the project. "We're trying to develop a community of future leaders and professionals who are committed to peace and dialogue and reconciliation," explains Miller.

"The students we look for have got the academic and personal skills to develop enterprise and projects that will underpin peaceful cooperation in the future and who have absolute commitment to improving their futures in this way rather than other means, such as violence."

It has been quite some build-up to last Monday, the students' first day in London: a year of fundraising, recruiting and selecting students, then interviewing them. The excitement of the first day is somewhat tarnished, though. Two of the students from Gaza were not allowed to cross the border to catch their flight to London and spent the whole of last week waiting at a checkpoint. University authorities "pulled out all the stops", eventually negotiating them a guaranteed passage to London five days later.

Mahmoud Al Ashi, 20, is also from Gaza City. He spent three days sleeping on the street at a checkpoint in Gaza, then another seven nights at the border with Egypt before the Israeli embassy in London managed to persuade the guards to let him through. "Those seven days I was supposed to spend with my mother in Egypt," he says. "I didn't get that time."

Ashi, like many of the others, has already been involved in community groups that bring together Israelis and Palestinians. He has also found small and personal ways of making contact. A year ago he met an Israeli online, and together they designed a network for traffic lights. "It was not so beneficial as a project," he says. "But it really is great for us to cooperate like that. We never met, we did the whole thing in chatrooms."

Back home, his interest in making contact with his Jewish Israeli peers is puzzling for some of his friends and family. "It's hard for people to understand ... why I would do this. Some people think I am coming to work as a spy. I am afraid to tell all of my friends."

He believes the key to a more peaceful future is dialogue. "When I talk with an Israeli person about the lives we lead, they find it hard to believe. There are changes that happen inside their minds. It's better than violence - it's education."

Ashi's story is very different from another of his Olive Tree colleague's, Ranin Boulos, 20. Boulos grew up in the Israeli village of Neve Shalom Wahat al-Salam (Arab and Jewish oasis of peace). The village is famous throughout the Middle East as the home of both Jews and Arabs who live together peacefully. Boulos is also famous in her own right. She started acting as a child, featuring on the Israeli version of Sesame Street, moved on to theatre and has just finished shooting a film.

"I am Arab Palestinian," she says. "I have Israeli citizenship. I am Protestant. I am a lot of things. But that's our problem out there, we have an identity problem."

She has put her acting career on hold while she gets her degree, and hopes to work in Arab schools in Israel when she returns, providing acting and music lessons. This is an important element of the scheme. Each student will go home after graduating to spend a year on a community project. "The aspirations of this scholarship are like my village," says Boulos. "I feel at home."

A parallel programme the students take alongside their degree will focus on cultural activities, to help them to settle into London life. But eventually this will provide a forum for them to tackle some of the more difficult aspects of the relationships they build up with one another - to resolve the conflicts their backgrounds, politics and lifestyles raise.

Jane Clements, of the Council for Christians and Jews, a "bridge-building" educational charity, who set up the parallel course, says: "We're not going to sit them down and tell them to come up with a new road map. Not at all. Obviously some people will discuss it as they go on. There will be difficult issues, and they need their own space to deal with it."

But many of the students will find more to fill their time - Dimi Reider, from Tel Aviv, for example, who delivered his application for the scholarship two minutes before the deadline and wrote 600 words too much on the form. He wants to be a journalist.

At Tel Aviv University, he says rather casually, he started a student movement for peace. Last November, he organised a small demonstration, and these demonstrations have since grown in number and turnout.

"Students in Israel are apathetic about politics even though they suffer as a result of it," he says. "They have to go into the army; they have their school budgets cut to pay for the army, and they aren't safe. But they are apathetic."

Other members of the group have found less overtly political ways of building bridges. Jotam Halevy, 25, will study for a psychology degree. He has already lived for three years in London, where he runs an Israeli-Palestinian orchestra. He, like most of the others, has wondered if these small-scale efforts make any dent in the vast problems in the Middle East.

"It is detached from events back there, but it's part of the project to go back home and work on joint community projects there," he says. "If it wasn't for that I'm not sure it would achieve anything."

All the students agree you have to start somewhere. Boulos says: "It's not like we alone can bring peace. But it is something."

Halevy adds: "It's a start. Just like the orchestra. It's a small project, but ideas have power."

· www.staff.city.ac.uk/~ra731/olivetreeTwo Olive Tree scholars will be keeping a weblog for EducationGuardian.co.uk, and Education Guardian will catch up with them again in the new year

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This article was published on
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at 08.08 EDT on Tuesday 28 September 2004.
It was last modified at 19.04 EDT on Thursday 12 June 2008.
It was first published at 08.08 EDT on Wednesday 13 October 2004.